The latest Red Means Recording video takes an in-depth look at the Polyend Tracker, a new portable workstation that offers a modern hardware take on the classic software tracker.
Pricing and Availability
Polyend Tracker is available to pre-order for $599 USD.
Strange: I love the idea of a hardware tracker, but the user interface seems not pretty fast to use. I feel that using FastTracker2 with a regular keyboard and a mouse is more fluent.
It’s nice to make this kind of thing, but actually I would prefer having a modern version of FastTrackerII with same working flow and just useful feature such as plugin fx and easy multi-track export.
Renoise?
https://www.renoise.com/
“I would prefer having a modern version of FastTrackerII”
and for that, have you tried Renoise?
or sunvox. sunvox i find to be much better. no plugin support though, so that would probably turn off a lot of people from it. but you can still send midi out, which is what ive done a few times from phone to synths. also free [except for ios/android]
sunvox is cool. there’s an open source project called Radium too, which is insanely powerful, and has a version of puredata embedded into it—but it’s a little tricky to wrap one’s head around, even for a tracker:)
and if plugins aren’t a prerequisite, there is an FT2 clone: https://16-bits.org/ft2.php
will look into radium – and ive seen a few ft2 clones, or ports for mac/windows [along with protracker ones] – i love trackers. cant be helped 😀
+1 on sunvox – so much fun and multiple platforms.
I like both, but i ll definitely check out Radium!
milky tracker, sunvox or deflemask might be good free alternatives for you.also check out hacked nintendo ds running nitro tracker. This tracker seems like its own beast.
its like using fairlight´s page r, or synclavier´s digital memory recorder, or the yamaha qx-1… in 2020. unmanageable imo.
Did you just randomly google some old tech? Sure looks like it.
He’s referring to it’s shitty specs. Which are pretty terrible considering how much it costs to produce something with decent specs these days. A minuscule amount of mono sampling, offline FX, MIDI on shitty mini TRS and a single stereo output also on mini TRS. This is OP-Z territory. Surprisingly though the OP-Z does more with less and is cheaper
Hmm… Those aren’t great comparisons if you want to describe shitty specs. Just plainly say what specs are shitty & make a clear point.
The comparison’s flawed because Ragnhild named genuinely powerful & noteworthy instruments. Yes they were revolutionary, but they were completely out of reach for regular people like us. They weren’t meant for hobbyists. That comment also disregards/disrespects the time & effort Polyend put into developing this. It can’t be easy feeding families & producing niche instruments.
A 2nd way to interpret Ragnhild’s comment (until the last sentence) is that this looks great, but is an anachromism. Which I’d assume is part of Polyend’s motivation (what’s old, cool & niche?).
It’s deeply irritating to read comments that wildly miss the point & are negative for the sake of it. Polyend ought to be commended for going out on a limb with their instruments. But I gotta respect you for attempting to understand Ragnhild’s point.
this loads stereo 32 bit which means it outclasses samplers in the same range. I love elektrons but find it curious that polyend gets flack every time they release an outclassed cheaper product. hopefully its coincidental
It has a screen. What more do you want?!
hehehehehee …. what happened to the like buttons? i want to like this comment
I learned on trackers, and for me one of the best things it can do that nothing else can is really precise and detailed note bending and slides… kinda like a 303 but with way more control over everything, and also it works for any track… other than that it can be fairly tedious to edit stuff
Why do none of the reviewers show this thing powering on? Does it have a boot time? Is it ready to go immediately or not? They all start their reviews with content already loaded and jump right into using it. I want to know what the out-of-box experience is like.
this one does have some loading time. on this video, dude opens a project [dont know when that happens, so skip around or something] and it takes like 20s [?] or so to load. thats one thing im worried about, but they keep repeating thats its still a beta and features might change and things will be optimized.
having said that, im getting more and more tempted on this. i want a hardware sequencer, but almost all of them are so limited in patterns and tracks. i’ll never understand that. im still sad i never managed to get a social entropy engine :'(
I’ve noticed in some reviews the menus are snappy but the UI is laggy or the knob doesn’t respond immediately. I’m sure this will be resolved before it ships just need to optimize the code.